Things haven’t gone well for United this season. Eight defeats in 24 Premier League games, 15 points adrift of league leaders Arsenal and seven points away from fourth spot, out of the FA Cup and the Capital One Cup all while playing utterly dire and pedestrian football. An absolute shambles, in other words.

With David Moyes increasingly under pressure and, according to many, increasingly out of his depth, even the feel-good factor generated by Juan Mata’s arrival evaporated within a week, with United’s season going from bad to worse after last Saturday’s defeat at Stoke.

With media and some section of fans piling up pressure of Moyes, one would have thought the senior figures in the dressing room would stand up for their manager or, at least, show the amount of responsibility and common sense that comes – or rather, should come – with age.

Instead Rio Ferdinand opted to needlessly stir things up a bit, as he fancied a break from flogging gear of dubious quality on Twitter and took to the social network to share his thought about Swansea’s decision to sack Michael Laudrup on Tuesday.

Except that Rio’s tweet yesterday had almost nothing to do with Swansea or their former manager, given that the United centre-back simply mentioned them as an excuse to conduct a sort of survey on Twitter over the identity of the next managerial casualty in the Premier League.

“Managerial merry go round looks on the cards again… who next after Laudrup are we thinking??” tweeted the ever so sarcastic Rio.

Considering that it’s been widely reported that him and Moyes haven’t seen eye-to-eye this season and that Moyes has been under immense pressure since replacing Sir Alex Ferguson, Ferdinand’s tweet was rather daft given he must have known full well that “David Moyes” would have been the most common response.

Rio’s been an outstanding servant for United, but he should know better than this. Much, much better.